Suit filed in purge of Florida voter rolls

6/8/12 5:56 PM EDT

Good-government advocates have sued the state of Florida, alleging its purge of non-citizens from voter rolls has swept up too many legally-registered African American and Latino voters and is undermining laws that ensure fair access to the ballot box.

The state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and the local office of the international law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP filed a federal lawsuit in Tampa, claiming that the state Bureau of Elections is breaking the law in its ongoing purge, designed to scrub voter registration lists ahead of the state’s August congressional primary.

Florida officials, according to the suit, are using outdated information and a badly-flawed process to conduct the purge, according to the suit. And the procedure, the advocates contend, requires lawful citizens and already legally registered voters to prove their citizenship or lose their ability to vote.

“Florida is flouting federal laws designed to protect voters from precisely this kind of action,” Bob Kengle, co-director, Voting Rights Project, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in a statement issued Friday. “The right of every citizen to have their voice heard at the ballot box is being threatened. The Lawyers’ Committee will continue to tirelessly fight any effort to make full-fledged Americans second-class citizens.”

“The illegal program to purge eligible voters uses inaccurate information to remove eligible citizens from the voter rolls,” Howard Simon, executive director of ACLUFL, added in the statement. Governor Rick Scott and his administration, Simon added, “mislead Floridians by calling their illegal list purge ‘protecting citizen's voting rights.’ This is precisely why Congress has re-enacted, and why we continue to need, the Voting Rights Act – to prevent state officials from interfering with the constitutional rights of minorities. We now look to the courts to stop the Scott administration from assaulting democracy by denying American citizens the right to vote.”

The lawsuit adds to the drama surrounding Florida authorities' attempt to update the state's voting rolls -- a move activists say is intended to suppress the vote and comes too close to the primary to be legal. State officials say the scrub, launched under Scott, a Republican, is necessary to prevent fraud and keep foreign nationals from tainting the ballot.

Last week, The Justice Department last month formally asked Florida to justify the move, warning that it might violate provisions in the Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act. In their response earlier this week, Florida officials insist the scrub is legal under both statutes, and would have happened much earlier in the election cycle if the Department of Homeland Security had allowed them to use a more expansive federal database for the comparison.